Speaker: I think over the
years, a lot of people have been talking about. mobile first, or this first, or that Speaker 2: first. Speaker: And yeah, I could
say AI first, for sure. But I feel like there's
still that human element that we have to consider. And so I feel that when you're
working in collaboration, both with the AI and with the human
pieces, Then it becomes more adjacent to your strategy. Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to the
conversations with Zendesk podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Thunders. Today, we are talking with
Brent Wisco, GM VP, customer support at Upwork, about how
they are providing support. Support for their customers. It goes beyond the usual
technical requests and how AI is really helping them to optimize
and become more efficient. Brent is an expert in this
area with over two decades of expertise in customer support
and operational excellence. He has a genuine passion for
technology and innovation, and he has successfully navigated Teams
through some major transformations that we'll hear a bit about today. In his current role at Upwork,
Brent leads the global workforce with an AI adjacent strategy,
and they have yielded some truly remarkable outcomes in cost
reduction while elevating the quality of the direct customer
interactions that they have. I can't wait to have him tell
you all about the cool things that they've achieved with AI. But first I wanted to shout out
a few exciting resources that are available for our listeners. We've just released a
new guide for CXOTalk. covering best practices and
tips for AI implementation. And it is free and
available at zendesk. com slash intelligent CX. If you're looking to dive deeper
into that topic, you can sign up for our upcoming webinar,
unlocking the power of AI for CX, which is coming up on June 4th. We'll be teaming up with experts
from AWS and IDC to discuss AI. Everything that you need to
know about AI for customer experience, from trends to
challenges, and much more. The link to register is
available in our show notes. You can find out about all of
these events and other Zendesk news anytime on our LinkedIn page. Visit zendesk. com slash li. And of course, as always, we
would love to hear from you. If you have questions that you'd
like to hear us answer or ideas for an episode, or you just want to
tell us what you think, please reach out to us at cwzpodcastatzendesk. com. Again, that's cwzpodcastatzendesk. com. All right. Without further delay,
Brent Plisko, welcome to the Conversations with Zendesk podcast. How are you today? Speaker: I'm all right, Nicole. Thanks so much for having me on. Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. I am so glad that you are here. You've done some really cool
things with AI, so I can't wait to dive into that. Thanks. But first let's set a
little bit of context. Upwork has a really unique business. Can you give us a quick overview
for those that maybe aren't familiar with your brand yet? Speaker: Yeah, absolutely, Nicole. So first and foremost,
Upwork, we believe we are the world's work marketplace. Not only that, our mission is
to create economic opportunities so people have better lives. And so what that means is that
we are providing a platform for people looking for work to come
with their skills and look for jobs that are posted by people
from around the world who are looking for work to be done. So Speaker 3: you're really
working to empower the work of freelancers and real humans
that are working outside of that typical nine to five workday. So Obviously there's probably some
basic technical issues that you end up troubleshooting as part
of your support org, but what other types of support do you
provide for your customer base? Speaker: That's a great question. So of course we're doing the
run of the mill support, getting people unstuck and helping them
be successful on our platform. But in addition to that, we have
some niche areas that are required by the needs of our customer. For example, we provide this
platform so that clients and freelancers can connect. And when they connect, sometimes
the contracts and as they go through the work that needs to
be performed, those contracts don't always result the way that
either party expects them to. And so we have an entire
function dedicated to resolving disputes and mediating
outcomes between the parties. We also are taking payments. We have a 1 billion GSV
that transacts through our platform every quarter. Speaker 3: Wow. Speaker: And so that is a
tremendous amount of money that's floating between parties. And we need to make sure that money
is getting to where it needs to go. We also provide our community
platform where our users can come and interact with one
another, either through community groups or in general forums. And then we have our
Upwork Academy team. Our Upwork Academy team is an
extension of customer support in which we're educating
our customers how to use our platform successfully. Speaker 3: So it sounds like
you've got a fairly complex support structure in that you've
got a bucket of things that are technical issues, a bucket
that's around financial things. And of course, I love that
you mentioned community. I'm a community builder myself. I'm always a big fan of
those kinds of connections. And then you've got your academy,
which sounds really interesting. Tell me a little bit about what
prompted the creation of the academy and why initiatives
along those lines are really important to your ecosystem. Speaker: Yeah, so our Academy
in its current iteration is not what it originally was. Originally, our Academy was born out
of necessity where customers were joining our platform and they were
having a hard time getting started. And so what we did is we created
a coaching program, offered it to freelancers where they could
come and connect with the coach and learn about being a freelancer
and learn about how to be a freelancer specifically on Upwork. Upwork. What we found over time is there
was a lot of core education being created out of that
function that would be much better suited at scale so that we
could reach a broader audience. And so the Academy
was born from that. And what the Academy team is
doing is they are building education content, be that a
course, Or a learning path to ensure that people coming onto
our platform can be successful. Speaker 3: That's like
some truly amazing support. So given that you've got all
of these different elements and aspects, and you really empower
your user base, talk to me a little bit about your channel mix. Do you have very
differentiated experiences? Are you kind of meeting
people wherever they are? What's your strategy around Speaker: that? Yeah. So everything today, as much
as possible, begins with AI. So that's the first
channel of engagement. You want to contact us, you are
going to experience in my opinion, an exceptional chatbot experience,
which not many can say that. And certainly there's
things that we're still working on to improve there. Certainly for some customer
segments, we do position other channels of availability. So we do have the
traditional phone channel. We do have limited email channel
availability, and yes, we have live chat too, but we really
want to position at the forefront the ability to self serve. And so the point of entry often
is the chatbot experience. Speaker 3: How long have you
had that AI experience in place? Speaker: The AI experience in its
current form has been in place just over a year, but we have actually
been using some sort of chatbot experience as part of our support
operation strategy for the better course of three to five years. It's just that the latest evolutions
that have come about have really allowed us to advance it quickly. Speaker 3: So what led you
to make that decision to put the AI right up front as
that first point of contact? Speaker: Just over a year ago,
our CEO came to us and said, look, what you're doing is fabulous,
but how do you 10X your results? And this was right at the cusp of
open AI coming onto the market and really starting to make a wave. And we said, we have a chatbot
capability already in place. We know that they're working
to integrate with chat GPT. Let us go unlock that door
and see what it can do for us. Speaker 3: So we talked a lot
about sort of balancing the human side of things with the
technology side of things. Obviously you've got a very
human centric business. You're dealing with individuals,
life and livelihood, and a lot of freelancers are working in
their personal areas, passion. How has the customer
response been to that AI? Have you seen that
be a positive thing? What feedback have you gotten? Speaker: Yeah, so we've received
feedback certainly all over the map, but in large part it's been very
positive because what we believe as we introduced this technology
is that what our customers wanted was answers quickly and they didn't
want to wait in a queue, they didn't want to wait in a backlog. For information that was going to
help them unlock their experience and help them get them on their way. And so overwhelmingly, what we've
seen is that as we adopted AI into our chatbot experience, we
have seen a 20 percent increase in our self service rates. So that alone says to me. You know what? There's something here. Our customers are actually getting
something out of it if they don't need to connect with an agent
to have their question answered. Now, what does that translate to? 20 percent increase. So our current self service rate is
right around 74 percent and we're continuing to inch that higher. Month after month, Speaker 3: I can see why people,
especially in your field wouldn't be really quick answers, right? Maybe if they're struggling with the
technical issue It's gonna reflect on how they engage with their
clients and the business they get so that increase in self service rate. That's huge That's
really impressive. What other impacts has it had
on the business internally? Speaker: What it's done is it's
really unlocked opportunities particularly for our agents So
what we really focused on with AI was making sure that we could
get those quick answers to our customers as fast as possible. One of the metrics as a support
leader that I've been tracking for years upon years, is first
contact resolution rates. 20 years ago when I got into this,
I would have celebrated really high rate of first contact resolution. When I came to Upwork and I
looked at our first contact resolution rate, and I looked
at the technologies that were available to us, when we were
trending between 80 to 90 percent first contact resolution, it said,
wow, we're spending a lot of time answering things that could be
answered before an agent is engaged. How can we translate our service
offering so that when you engage with an agent, there's extreme
value provided in that experience. So that the customer is coming
and interacting with an agent for more than just a question
response, but for a more meaningful conversation to hopefully drive
that customer outcome even further. So for our agents, what that's
meant is that The contacts that they are now receiving, they're
not the run of the mill questions that they were getting before. Now they have to think more
critically about that customer's experience and all the elements
of it and engage with them in a way that really builds their
skillset, maybe flexes it for some, but makes it more exciting
so that they're not just closing a ticket and moving on to the next. Speaker 3: It sounds like it's
really improving the agent's experience of their own jobs. We've talked about that as a
prediction in a couple of our previous episodes that this is one
of the potential outcomes of AI. So it's really wonderful to
hear that you're actually seeing those results where
it's helping them level up. It's helping them have a more
engaged and more exciting experience and it's bringing
greater value to the actual conversation and the actual use
of the humans, where you're not just saying, Hey human, can you
go find the right article in your knowledge base and read it to me? But you're saying,
Hey, support agent. Let's have a consultative
conversation and help me think through this problem
or something like that. And it's interesting because it
parallels what you were saying about the way that you help build
skillsets for your freelancers. So it sounds like inside and out
Upwork is really helping people up level in their careers, which
is just absolutely amazing. Speaker: I think that's
exactly right, Nicole. Speaker 3: What kinds of
things are you doing internally to help upskill them? And how are you sort of
imagining those career paths shifting in the long term? Speaker: Yeah, so I think right
now it's naturally occurring. So as the agents are receiving
different opportunities presented to them, they're taking that challenge
and looking to learn from that. And certainly we're providing them
with coaching opportunities as well to ensure that they succeed
in the support of our customers. I believe that there's always going
to be a need for human interaction. To some degree for some percentage
of concerns that are raised, but for where we still have
opportunities to leverage self service to help that customer
get up and on their way quickly. Some of those agents. We can then look to say, maybe
you actually are now working with the AI to coach it and train
it the same way that you are trained, not with the interest
in eliminating your role, but because you know so much about this
space and you've been really in tune with our customers problems,
we can stay on top of the next. issue that comes up and ensure
that the technology with the chatbot can answer for it. Speaker 3: So as you were
implementing all of these AI pieces, what were some of the
biggest challenges you faced and how did you work through those? Speaker: We really set
a high bar for risk. We are risk takers. As a value for our company,
we build and break fearlessly. So with that value in mind, we
didn't have too many roadblocks to get off and on our way. As we continue to advance, we're
at a 74 percent self service rate today, as I mentioned, every
percentage point more that we gain in our self service rate
is going to require that much more effort to achieve because
we've taken a lot of the simple stuff out of the equation. So our biggest roadblock right
now, and not even roadblock, but our opportunity Is to now
look at the more personalized experience for the customer. Moving beyond the basic
question answer to saying. Oh, we know who you are. We know information that is privy
to you as well regarding your interactions on our platform. Let us go and dip into that
and surface it to you so that we can provide more directed
support within that experience. Speaker 3: It's so critical
to be able to do that. One of the things that we've
repeatedly found in our CX Trends report is that
customers really want those personalized experiences, right? They're comfortable with a
company tracking all their activity and having all this
data about them, but only if the company is actually using it to
provide personalized experiences. A faster, more personalized, more
specific experience for those users. What were some of the discussions
or decisions internally when you started implementing the AI? How did you approach it? What were some of the things your
organization was thinking about? Speaker: We approached
it by looking at what. audiences we could target first. And certainly we looked at
audiences who were having a little bit easier time on our platform,
but maybe just needed some simple help to get them over a hurdle
that they were experiencing. So that was some of
the early conversation. In addition, we were looking
very closely at what content is actually going to help train the AI. We have a tremendous amount
of content in our help center. And so that was a very easy way
for us to go and point the AI engine and say, Hey, go out to the
help center and learn from that. In addition, we have other resources
that we started to say, where would we prioritize that next? If we're training our agents
with certain knowledge, why don't we take that same
knowledge and train the AI? Because what we want to
do is really make the two. Inseparable, almost. Mm Speaker 2: hmm. Speaker: At your human interaction
to bot interaction is seamless. And you as a consumer may not ever
know where the separation exists. Now, certainly there's controversy
in that as well, for those who might not prefer working with. Speaker 3: Sure, there's gotta be
a level of transparency there, but I think you can have a seamless
experience and be transparent about interacting with a bot or a human
that's being augmented by a bot. Mm hmm. Speaker: Yeah, exactly. It's not hidden to our customers
that, hey, this is a bot. You can see what engine
is powering this. Speaker 3: So going forward,
you talked about analyzing what were some of the low hanging
fruit questions, training on your help center and your knowledge
based information, how are you continuing to stay connected with
the needs of your customers as they evolve and optimizing for
those new things that come up? Speaker: Yeah. So this is where we have a very
close partnership and collaboration with our customer insights team. We call them our C360 team. And what they are doing is they
are taking feedback that's surfaced from our platform insights that
are surfaced from the tickets that are being routed either
through our chatbot or direct customer interactions with our
agents, as well as other external sources, Reddit forums and so on. And they're consolidating that and
actually applying AI there too, to pull forward the categories of
where customers are having concerns. They take that and then
map that against what we're referring to as experience debt. Now, this is something that I
didn't have a understanding of prior to recently, but being a
technical person by training, there's technical debt or tech debt
that every company continues to collect over time because you're
really iterating quickly and you don't have time to go and clean up
the things that were left behind, Speaker 3: right? Right. Right. Speaker: The same thing goes
with experience debt, and this is where you look at the actual
interactions within the product, and you say, Oh, wait a second,
we missed something there. And so combining the data that's
being surfaced out of the sources I mentioned with identifying
these key areas of friction on the platform, compile into
an experience debt database. Recently, right around
Valentine's day. Our team, in collaboration
with the C360 team, sponsored a week long Customer Love Week. And we used that week to go into
the Experienced Debt Database and meet with our product partners and
review the items that our customers were saying we could do better. Out of that, we received more
than a dozen commitments of items that will be fixed on our
platform In a forthcoming fix it week, there's interest now in
making this art of the way that we operate and not an annual
event, which is super exciting. And the it's a win situation. Our customers are better equipped
with a better experience and support is not receiving the
contacts that were just frustrating our customers for which. There may be some workarounds
and in other cases there weren't. And so it wasn't leaving
them with the delightful experience that we would want. Speaker 3: What an amazing way to
show your customers that you're really listening and you really
care about their experience and you're making sure that you are
taking some time to pause and. Work through those pieces and really
make sure that they're getting what they need out of that experience. I would love to see every
tech company do that. I think it's just
such a brilliant idea. As you look to the future, what
are you most excited about? Whether it's with AI or
innovation more broadly, what are you looking forward to? Speaker: I'm a technology
person, as I mentioned. And so I'm really excited
about the future of where the technology is heading. And so we'll be looking to
continue to invest and explore new technologies as well as
approaches to how do we really focus on the customer experience
and the agent experience too. I think there remains a lot in an
AI adjacent approach where we can continue optimize by adding Other
elements, including automations to the experience I talked about the
personalization of the experience. I think those are the things that
really get me excited beyond that. We are running a very large scale
support organization and so really looking closely at workforce
management, looking closely at Q. a. And, oh, by the way, where can we
apply AI to those disciplines too? Because once you apply that layer on
top, so many more insights rise to the surface than they could before
when you were doing it manually. Speaker 3: Absolutely critical
to be looking at those pieces. Zendok had some recent acquisitions
around workforce management and QA and tying that together with AI. So we're right behind you there. We're right in line with
all of those pieces. I want to ask you about
a term that you've used, which it is AI adjacent. I'm seeing a lot of companies
talking about how they're being AI driven and their AI strategies. Why do you choose to call
it AI adjacent strategy? Speaker: That's a great question. This is something that I recently
gave a lot of thought to. And I think over the years,
a lot of people have been talking about mobile first. Or this first or that first. And yeah, I could say AI first
for sure, but I feel like there's still that human element
that we have to consider. And so I feel that when you're
working in collaboration, both with the AI and with the human
pieces, it's Then it becomes more adjacent to your strategy. And so that's why more recently
I've adopted that phrase. Speaker 3: Tell me how that aligns
with your company values and maybe your company mission statement. Speaker: This is a world's
workbook marketplace and we're creating economic
opportunities for individuals. And so a very core component
of that are people. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Speaker: If I'm not thinking
about how I work with the team, how I support them, and then I
feel like I'm doing an injustice. And when you're coupling
AI, my belief is it's not going to take over the world. It's certainly going to drive
a lot of enhancements, but we still have plenty of people
who are doing the work. Speaker 3: hit through this
conversation by the way that you really beautifully navigate that
balance of human and technology. In each item that we've talked about
today, you've told me how you're thinking about the human approach
and then how you're also moving very quickly and you're not risk averse
and you're trying out technology. And it seems like you've just
got a wonderful balance between the two sides of that and you're
navigating that really well, which makes a ton of sense for the
kind of business that you're in. So thank you for sharing
all of those insights today. It's been very inspiring. Speaker: My pleasure, Nicole. Thank you. Speaker 3: Yes. And I have one last question
for you before we hang up. One of the things that we always
love to ask each of our customers is what is a great customer experience
that you have had in your life? Is there a time that you've
received some amazing customer service or something that stands
out in your memory or something that you think of when you're
considering how could we offer better service to our customers? Do you have any examples
along those lines? Speaker: I do. In fact, it's a recent one. So for spring break, my wife
and I took our family down to Disney World in Orlando. Speaker 3: Oh, how fun. Speaker: The place to go to
the happiest place on earth. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker: It was happy most of
the time, except when there were the long waits to get back to
the resort at the end of the day. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker: But one of the things
that I really thought was remarkable is that Disney really
has a way with customer service. And I knew this going in because
we've gone to Disney properties in the past, but this time our kids
were so enthralled with the little souvenirs that they would get. And so when we went to Epcot,
we went on the Ratatouille ride and afterwards our eight year
old really wanted this little Remy doll that sits on a magnet
on top of your shoulder and it just walks around the park with
you as, as you, it's adorable. He lost it. Speaker 3: Oh no. Oh no. Speaker: So we were trying to
console him and at the same time, I looked up and I saw a cast
member and I said to my wife, we should go ask the cast member. They're really good at this. So we did. And she's like, oh, I'm
really sorry about that. Here, let me help you go
onto our website on your app and fill out a lost in form. Form. Okay, lost and found form. Great. How many items get lost
in Disney World every day? Speaker 3: Probably thousands. Speaker: Within two days we
had received an email from Disney saying, we have found
your item, your little Remy doll, and we will get it back
to you, no cost for shipping. And it was like, My eight year
old, when he heard that he was going to get that item back,
so happy, it was just, he had a great time on vacation, but
that one experience really left a mark and for him to get home,
Hey, Remy's going to come back. It was awesome. Speaker 3: I bet he'll
remember that forever. They've made a really
lasting impact on. Your whole family and
especially your child. That's amazing. Brent, this has been
a real pleasure. Thank you so much
for joining me today. It's been wonderful to hear
about your use of AI, your technological innovation, as well
as balancing that with the human side of your customer service. So keep up the great work. Speaker: Thanks, Nicole. Speaker 3: Upscaling agents and
managing change is such a big topic right now, no matter where
you are in the evolution process. So to that end, we thought we would
share how Zendesk is approaching and thinking about AI integration
for our own support teams. What lessons we can share at this
stage of our journey and what we're excited about for the future. So we'll be joined next
week by Steven Warfield, our new VP of customer service. Here's a teaser for
that conversation. Speaker 4: Having that ability and a
carved out predefined space to talk about these things I think has been
one of the biggest parts for us and that's still early in the evolution. It's moving really fast, but
sizing a space for people to deliver feedback and really
defining what are we looking for? What are the things that are working
really well and what are the things that need to have improvement? Being really specific and
I would say purposeful in the type of feedback you're
looking for is really critical. And leaders need to be
trained on how to do that. Speaker 3: Be sure to join us in two
weeks for that insightful discussion and make sure that you're following
the show so that you don't miss it. As always, if you like what you
hear, please consider giving us a five star rating on your
favorite podcast platform, sharing with a friend or
colleague, or leaving us a review. We really appreciate your support. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders
for Zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience.
